Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up: Connect with Totems in Your Ecosystem by Lupa

Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up: Connect with Totems in Your Ecosystem Reviews

• 
  Janis Hill

  I would like to thank Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. for providing me with a free ARC of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an open and honest review.
  
  Sadly this is a DNF book as I just couldn't connect with the book and the author. I loved her passion and found her writing style easy to follow… there was just something about it that wasn’t for me.
  
  I know other people will give a book a bad/low mark for being a DNF, but as an author myself I know how bad that feels. So I hope my no score is less painful. I’m not going to score this book as I don’t want to give it a bad score - as I don’t feel it deserves one. Nor do I want to give it a high score for the same reason.
  
  Basically, this book was not for me. There is nothing wrong with the writing or the story; I just couldn’t get into it. From other reviews I have read, people have loved this book. To me that proves it’s good… for the right audience.
  
  This does not make it a bad book, and I really want to emphasise this. Despite not liking it and not being able to get into it, I did see potential. I, the reader, and this book just weren’t matched and I refuse to mark it down because of my own faults. :-)
  
• 
  David

  "Nature Spirituality" is a rare beast in the "witchy" space, a book about Nature Spirituality that puts much more emphasis on the ecology, rather than projections of ancient human tradition or personal view. Many natural resources and wildlife biologists, like myself, often struggle with folks who are more focused in mysticism, and Lupa, in this piece, attempts to bridge this gap far better than books that attempted the same before.
  
  When next you wander the woods, if you're a more nitty gritty ecology type, consider using the reccomendations in this book to connect on a more spiritual level with the ecosystem around you. And if you're a more magic and mysticism type, use this book to really understand your ecosystem's functions, all the way down to microbe and soil, not just the big sexy wolves and redwoods.
• 
  Leah Markum

  I regard this book as a gentle read. I initially didn't leave a review because I didn't have strong opinion or analysis to express. However, it is worth mentioning that Lupa gives excellent qualitative descriptions about ecological topics like bioregions, along side descriptions to help you open yourself to seeing the world in a spiritual like. It's wonderful to not only think about the natural world as a home, but to break it down by address--I'm in the Beaver Lake watershed in the Boston Mountains, a part of the Ozark Mountains within the Mississippi greater watershed.
  
  Some spirituality books can be too "off" for me, which is part of the reason why I describe this book as "gentle." Lupa's views or her narrative don't grate me and are actually close to my own beliefs. Applying the concept of totems as a lens to see the world with evokes a sense of history, personally and culturally. Maybe some criticize that it's cultural misappropriation, but once upon a time, no matter where your ancestors were, they likely worshiped totems. No one culture owned the idea. I think revitalizing and personalizing the idea is a good way to appreciate so much about the world--human and natural, material or spiritual.